Dudley Dudley recalls her fight with big oil

Thursday

PORTSMOUTH — When a foreign billionaire sought to turn the New Hampshire Seacoast into the home of the world's largest oil refinery, he was met with an obstacle.

Her name was Dudley Dudley and it was 1974.

Dudley, a former state representative and executive councilor from Durham, was the dynamic force that stifled the plans of Aristotle Onassis, a Greek shipping magnate who had amassed the world's largest privately owned shipping fleet. In the 1970s, he was intent on building an oil refinery on the shores of Great Bay and turning the Isles of Shoals into a super-port.

As part of a Star Island Earth Day lecture hosted at Discover Portsmouth on Thursday, Dudley shared her tale of noble environmental activism with an enthusiastic crowd.

Joe Watts, Star Island CEO, introduced Dudley as not only a "local legend, but a mother and a grandmother, a lifetime lover of the Isles of Shoals." In 1976, Dudley was the first woman elected to the New Hampshire Executive Council, and her portrait was just recently hung in the Statehouse.

"Say 45 years ago, I was a new legislator in the New Hampshire Legislature," Dudley said. "I had no idea across the world there was a man doing everything he could to turn the Seacoast of New Hampshire into a Houston, a Dallas, or New Jersey."

The $600 million plan included shipyards, power plants, aluminum facilities and an oil refinery, but it went largely under the radar until a local newspaper based in Newmarket broke the story.

The newspaper, at the time called Publick Occurrences, was "absolutely essential in the effort to beat Onassis," Dudley said. While no other paper in the state would touch the issue in the beginning, she said, Publick Occurrences would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage.

Dudley said then Gov. Meldrim Thomson was behind the effort to bring the oil refinery to New Hampshire. "These bandits were asking us to trust them, and for the construction of the world's largest refinery," she said. Onassis was offering New Hampshire "carrots:" cheaper and more plentiful oil, jobs and lower taxes.

Dudley said a committee at the University of New Hampshire ultimately debunked Onassis' offerings to the Granite State.

In the 1970s, Dudley said in an "off year" for the Legislature, if a bill was introduced for a special session, it had to be deemed an emergency. She successfully argued to the House speaker that the oil refinery proposal constituted as an emergency.

House Bill 18, "a very simple bill," would require a majority vote by a town to approve a site plan for an oil refinery.

"And we were off to the races," Dudley said.

At that point, more than half of the land in Durham, approximately 3,500 acres to be exact, had been optioned for the proposal, without residents knowing the future plans and purpose.

More than 4,000 signatures were obtained for a petition that Dudley eventually brought to the governor's office, following several canceled meetings.

"He told me to get off my high horse and get out of here," she said. "I curbed the impulse to slam his very heavy oak door."

Town Meeting day in Durham came, March 1974. In a non-binding referendum vote, the town voted in a 9-to-1 ratio "no" to the oil refinery proposal. The next day, Dudley's bill was heard on the House floor.

"I made an impassioned speech asking for the votes, and then the non-binding but huge 'no' vote in Durham was there to persuade legislators from Salem, Berlin, Concord and Manchester," she said.

The bill passed.

Dudley noted the night after the Legislature vote, she was having dinner in Concord when she noticed the consultants for the proposal were dining across the restaurant. When she saw them approaching, she assumed they were alerting her of another upcoming plan.

"They had come to tell us that they knew that the right side had won," she said with a laugh.

Watts said Dudley's story was one showing what a group a people coming together can accomplish, "a good story for us to hear, particularly today."

"Star Island and the Shoals survived," Dudley said. "As did Durham and Great Bay. And the sun continues to rise and set over our beautiful ocean."

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